tr - Translate

tr is quickly becoming one of my favorite unix utilities. It is incredibly
versatile and incredibly powerful. It can also be easier on the eyes for simple
subsitutions than sed.

Basics of tr

The easiest and most common way to explain is that it translates characters from one set to their equivalent match in the second set. Lets see some examples.

$ echo "Hello World" | tr 'elo' '310'
H3110 W0r1d

It subsituted the 'e' for the '3' and 'l' for '1' and so on.

Notice how it was not a literal subsituation but rather a per-character
transposition. The input and output sets don't always have to match in size, but if they do the translation will be most easy to understand.

For example, this is pretty easy to understand:

$ echo "Hello World" |tr 'AEIOUaeiou' 'X'
HXllX WXrld

But this is a bit more suprising.

$ echo "foo" | tr 'foo' 'bar'
brr

Snippets:

Convert a string to lowercase

$ echo UPPERCASE | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]'
uppercase

Atomize a string

$ echo "these are some words" | tr -sc '[A-Z][a-z]' '[\012*]'
these
are
some
words

Clean up a filename

This is pretty opinionated about how a filename should look... Also, this may
look long but the nice thing is the filenames can often be auto completed.